Yes, Kejriwal has lost the Delhi elections. But make no mistake- the AAP put up a valiant and courageous fight, and came to within inches of winning. Don’t let these sold out media platforms and sundry Yogendra Yadav clones tell you otherwise, look at the official figures. The BJP at 46% of the vote share was only 2% ahead of AAP at 44%- it is the oddity of the first-past-the-post system that converted this into a 26 seat lead for God’s Own Party. In a proportionate system both the parties would have been tied at 35 seats apiece. By no means has the AAP been “wiped out”, as some commentators and bhakts would have you believe: in Delhi AAP remains a potent force which can still take the fight to the BJP over the next five years. Don’t look at the size of the dog in the fight, look at the size of the fight in the dog.
Nobody in his right senses expected the AAP to win, the odds against it were overwhelming- relentless persecution by the Center over the last five years, jailing of all its top leaders on trumped up charges unsubstantiated by any evidence even after three years of arrests, raids and investigations, blatant sniping and sabotaging by the Lieutenant Governor, blocking of all its popular schemes on one pretext or the other, a partisan police force, a defiant bureaucracy with loyalties to the Center rather than the elected government of the state, an Election Commission which is now a player in the game rather than an umpire, the deletion and injection of thousands of dubious votes before the elections, a somnolent judiciary which has failed to curb the executive or deliver timely justice, a Corporate India rooting for the BJP in the hope of churning out more billionaires, an announcement of major tax breaks just four days before polling in a condemnable violation of the model code of conduct.
And yet, it is testament to the resilience of the AAP that it almost won. For the first time in any state the BJP was forced to modify its electoral strategy, as Harish Khare has pointed out in an article: the BJP was compelled to soft pedal its communal tool- kit and adopt a leaf out of Kejriwal’s welfare book. No other political party could have come even close to matching AAP’s performance. Certainly not the Congress with its recent track record of being annihilated in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhatisgarh and Haryana.
That being said, one hopes that Kejriwal and his advisors are also doing some deep reflection and soul-searching. For their mistakes too are many: a will o’ the wisp ideological opportunism, embracing of a copy-cat “soft” Hindutva, keeping silent on Muslim persecution at Shaheen Bagh and the NE Delhi riots, uncalled for hounding of Rohingya refugees, excessive welfarism at the cost of Delhi’s crumbling infrastructure. These have contributed to the 9% away swing of its vote share, but they are not the prime reason for its loss. The death blow was delivered by its Alliance partner, the Congress.
One hopes that the Congress will also do some introspection, once they are finished gloating over Kejriwal’s “downfall.” For it is this, now largely irrelevant party, which ensured the AAP’s defeat. Figures now released by the ECI show that in 14 constituencies the Congress candidates polled more votes than the BJP candidates’ winning margin, thus ensuring the latter’s win; these include seats contested by Kejriwal, Sisodia, Somnath Bharti and Saurabh Bharadwaj. Rahul Gandhi (or the coterie of sleeper cells around him) have extracted their “revenge” even though the party got just 6% of the votes, did not win a single seat, and 67 of their candidates lost even their deposits! At the rate this party continues to cut off its nose to spite its face in every election, it will soon have no nose left, just a void where it will bury a hundred years of its history and achievements.
Congress apologists have been defending its contesting against AAP in Delhi by pointing out that this is exactly what the latter did to the Congress in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Himachal, but this analogy is faulty. For in none of these states was the Congress, or any Alliance partner, the ruling party at the time of the elections, both parties were fighting against the BJP. But in Delhi the Congress was fighting against an Alliance partner and trying to dislodge one of its own. It did not have a claim to even a single seat in Delhi given its miserable 4% vote share and performance in the last ten years. And yet, for reasons that can only be attributed to a sense of entitled egotism and the thirst for revenge, it decided that “na jeetunga, na jeetne doonga.”
The Congress has now become a spoiler at the national level, a clear and present danger to the restoration of democracy in India. It cannot forget its grand past and refuses to accept that it is no longer a “national party” at the state level- the brutal truth is that it is now just another regional party in a couple of states. It will not play second fiddle to any other regional party and refuses to abide by an unwritten Alliance Dharma. For the sake of the nation it must be persuaded to abandon its delusions of grandeur, to accept reality and to recognise that its first priority has to be to fight the BJP, not its allies.
The Delhi model of governance that AAP offered as an alternative to the Gujarat model worked, as two successive massive wins by the AAP proved. For the first time in our history an alternate model of politics was offered in Delhi, one based on concern for the under privileged, “life-line” services as a right, unsupported by money bags and corporates, without any communal agenda, all actively propagated by a cadre of educated, committed and idealistic workers and volunteers. This was the anti-thesis of all that the BJP stands for, and could not be allowed to succeed. The ruling party has achieved its demolition objective, and Kejriwal has to share part of the blame for this, as pointed out in earlier paras. He must now course correct, go back to the party’s original drawing board, seek out saner counsel and advisors and remain true to the original vision with which his party was founded. The coming days will not be easy for him for all the dogs of war will be set loose on him and his leaders. AAP has to rediscover the gritty resilience which had brought it to power in the first place- it still has the support of the electorate (it’s core vote of 44% is more than the BJP’s 38%) but it has to rebuild its ideological foundations. It has to stand for something positive and unambiguous, not be all things to all people or have a negative or equivocal ideology.
The Congress must realise that the voter must be given a binary choice only. Or else, by 2029 there will be no party left to do any fighting, and nothing worth fighting for.
This article is re-published here by kind permission of the author Avay Shukla. The original article can be found here – View from [Greater] Kailash: AAP IS ALIVE AND KICKING–IT’S THE ALLIANCE WHICH IS ON (CONGRESS) ASSISTED DYING
